Saturday, November 20, 2004

Over at Digital-Web, Dirk Knemeyer wrote two articles under the title "The End of Usability Culture" (1 and 2) and received quite some attention.

I have some issues with his use of the word design and how designers will be the people that take control away from usability experts.

I almost agree when Dirk says "On both a disciplinary level and within our project teams, we need big thinkers who lead the exploration of this exciting time and medium." But it is the "big thinkers" part (Dirk also uses "visionary") where I think he is wrong.
Dirk seems to equate design with innovation. In the first article he says:

"Design [..] is a sensibility that is often visionary and is about seeing beyond the surface."

In the second he poses that:

"we need to be led by the people who both understand Web design and are able to innovate in the Web space."

But why this focus on making something different? What's wrong with simply making a difference? Because, in my opinion, that is what design is all about: specifying something that fulfills a purpose and thereby making a difference. I do not think that it must be the creatives, the innovaters-for-the-sake-of-it, that should take control. So, who should?

Dirk and I agree that a design project needs a design champion; someone who defends the solution's central concepts and manages those aspects of the project that deal with transforming these concepts into an implementation. We need people with a wide-angle view of the project.
Dirk seems to call this person a Web Designer who, according to the second article, should have a focus on understanding web technologies, although his first article seemed to lean towards a preference to visual design. At my former company we called this person the Concept Designer which in my opinion is more specific. From my article on the T-model you can guess that I would call them User Experience designers.

Thursday, November 18, 2004

Last weekend's Design Engaged was a marvellous experience. Andrew Otwell managed to gather a group of extremely smart people (thank you Andrew!), and most of the time I felt I was only on the border of their discussions and trains of thought. Next time I'm going to be prepared...

Thursday, November 11, 2004

Tomorrow and the weekend I'll be amongst Designers, attending and speaking at Design Engaged. Design Engaged will be a chance for designers to gather to discuss current challenges and opportunities. What do new technologies like pervasive computing offer designers? What obstacles do you find in coming up with innovative ideas, and how do you collaborate with others to make those ideas happen? What do fields like architecture or software development have to offer design, and vice versa? I'll be talking about the "how do you collaborate with others to make those ideas happen" part.

I will present STUX, our in-house developed design methodology (not to be mistaken for STUX, the free Linux distribution), there for the first time. Wonder if they will pick it up...

Here's a low-res diagram of all the deliverables in STUX, to give you an idea of how we present it internally to our colleagues:

In my opinion, that means AIfIA should guard the "inner corners" of the T-model.
First of all, it is in those corners where the distinction between IA and, let's say, interaction design or usability is made; on the vertical axis between the IA column and the columns of other fields. There it is all about differentiation.

Second, it's where unification must occor. On the horizontal axis, AIfIA should stress that there is indeed an overlap between what some IA's do and what some interaction designers and usability experts do. We are all part of the UX umbrella.

Let's see if AIfIA is guarding the corners:

Q: Is there a razor-sharp definition of IA on the website?A: No, the current definition is inherently ambiguous on purpose.

I think this should change. How? By accepting a better definition, for example this one, by Tony Byrne:

Information Architecture (IA) is commonly understood to be the art and science of structuring, organizing, and labeling information so that content owners can better manage it and users can find what they're looking for more effectively. IA can be bottom-up (i.e. analyzing and labeling content chunks) or top-down (i.e developing standardized categorization schemes or taxonomies).

Saturday, November 06, 2004

Do you remember Peter Morville's article Big Architect, Little Architect? In it he describes the Big Information Architect as "an orchestra conductor or film director, conceiving a vision and moving the team forward", a quote from Gayle Curtis. This would be a person at the "other end of the spectrum" from the little information architect who "may focus solely on bottom-up tasks such as the definition of metadata fields and controlled vocabularies".

In my opinion, it is time we re-label the field of Big IA into User Experience.

In discussing the future of AIfIA with AIfIA Board member Eric Reiss over dinner last week, I started sketching a model of my field, as seen from the perspective of an Information Architect.

The model showed a big "T", with the vertical line representing the field of IA with varying degrees of depth, while the horizontal line represented the width of related fields around us. We decided to call it the T-model.

The depth of IA ranges from shallow subjects that have clear overlap with the other fields to deep subjects that other fields hardly touch upon. Shallow subjects are navigation, labeling, and content that overlap with interaction design, marketing and copywriting for example. Deep subjects would be search, metadata, and controlled vocabularies. Peter Morville's little IA's live here, and each would have his own strengths.

Related fields, placed in the horizontal line of the T-model, have interests that overlap with our shallow subjects. Examples are interaction design, usability, information design, visual design, accessibility, copywriting, business modeling, markting and computer science. Big IA's know a little bit of all these fields to allow them to play the role of conductor.

Now, what if we look at this model from the perspective of, say, an Interaction Designer (IxD)? I am sure the subscribers to the IxD mailinglist have little IxD's and Big IxD's amongst them. They have their own T-model, with the vertical line standing next to "our" vertical line, but their horizontal line overlaps with ours! And the same is true for usability specialists, copywriters, information designers, etc.

Now, as far as I can see, the horizontal overlap is the place where User Experience (UX) practitioners operate. They are likely to have a background in one of the fields (their private vertical line) but in their work they focus on the horizontal line, orchestrating specialists who operate in their vertical.

Why would Information Architects be the ones to claim the "Big" label, effectively placing the related fields below IA instead of at its side. Do we posses a special skill that practitioners in the other fields don't? What is that skill? Is it related to one of the deep subjects or one of the shallow subjects? I cannot tell and I think it is wrong.

I am ready to give up the title Big IA in favour of User Experience practitioner, are you?

Wednesday, November 03, 2004

Wow! Yesterday we had another Amsterdam IA Cocktail Hour and I am very, very happy with the outcome.

We had Peter Morville attend until he had to leave for the User Experience 2004 speaker dinner. He was clearly the center of attention for the first hour. Then Eric Reiss really livened up the evening and ended up having dinner with the nine die-hards until midnight.

It was good to see the the visiting UX2004 conference attendees mix with the usual suspects as well as the people that had promised to show up some time and choose yesterday to do that. I really enjoyed just walking around from group to group and hear them, well...network, basically. I was glowing!-- advertisement --I again received some requests to make the Cocktail Hours more formal, and even got an offer to make a suitable space available (thank you Elma!). Since it always has been my intention to mix educational aspects with socializing and networking, I am going to try and arrange this. Soon we'll have another IA Cocktail Hour-with-a-projector. My only request will be that there needs to be a case of beer in a corner somewhere :-)

P.S.: Eric also made an announcement that I am very proud of, but I can't tell anything about it yet. Stay tuned...

About Me

I am Peter Boersma (1970), male, and I live in an apartment from 1750 in the center of Amsterdam. I work with Adaptive Path on their European projects.
I studied computer science and ergonomics, and have been working in the user experience (UX) field since 1995. I speak at and help organize (inter)national UX conferences and am the host of the Amsterdam UX Cocktail Hours.